Sugar Cookies (1973)

A film producer murders his star actress during an erotic "game" and makes it look like suicide. The dead girl's lesbian lover discovers what happened, and plots her revenge.

Director:

Theodore Gershuny

Writers:

Theodore Gershuny, Lloyd Kaufman

Stars:

George Shannon, Mary Woronov, Lynn Lowry

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
George Shannon	...	Max Pavell
Mary Woronov	...	Camila Stone
Lynn Lowry	...	Alta Leigh / Julie Kent
Monique van Vooren	...	Helene
Maureen Byrnes	...	Dola
Daniel Sadur	...	Gus
Ondine	...	Roderick
Jennifer Welles	...	Max's Secretary
Anthony Pompei	...	Oliver
Reid Cruickshanks	...	Det. Schwartz
Thomas Mahony	...	Det. Joe
Ralph R. Ralph	...	Doctor
Stanley Kaufman	...	Lawyer (as S. Lloyd Kaufman Sr.)
Shawn Randall	...	Girl In Restaurant
Allen Liffman	...	Man In City Woman

Storyline

A film producer murders his star actress during an erotic "game" and makes it look like suicide. The dead girl's lesbian lover discovers what happened, and plots her revenge.

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Plot Keywords:

murder of a nude woman | woman in a bathtub | murder | lesbian | revenge | 

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Taglines:

Sugar Cookies... soft on the inside... hard on the outside

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Genres:

Drama | Thriller

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Certificate:

X

Did You Know?

Trivia

Lynn Lowry initially turned the script down because she objected to all the extensive nudity that her dual role entailed. But later, in an interview, she said being naked on set all the time wasn't a big deal. "Dealing with all the nudity was very difficult in the beginning. Just the idea of being nude in front of all these people is hard. But after you've done it, and by the first night you've spent 14 hours nude, nobody cares anymore. Nobody looks at you anymore, you're laying on the floor and crew people are stepping over your nude body. After a while, it's just like you're in clothes."

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Connections

References See No Evil (1971)

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Soundtracks

You Say You've Never Let Me Down
Music by Gershon Kingsley
Lyrics by Lloyd Kaufman

User Reviews

Purveyors of the "art film" prey on lookalike lovelies

Unholy hybrid of psychological melodrama and soft-core nudie (with some head-scratchingly odd comedic asides added to the imbalance) has an immoral, decadent producer of 'arty' porno films playing kinky sex-and-death games with his X-rated starlet ("Get the perfume! Now load the gun!"). He goes too far and kills her, yet the coroner is apparently fooled into believing her death was a suicide (though the shooting is suspicious enough to get a middle-aged detective to start sniffing around). The filmmaker's alibi is provided by his statuesque assistant, a hedonistic bisexual vamp who lies for him but has a secret: she was in love with the dead actress, and plots her revenge. Cobbled together by writers Theodore Gershuny (who also directed, badly) and Lloyd Kaufman (who also co-produced, along with future director Oliver Stone, Ami Artzi, Garrard Glenn and Jeffrey Kapelman), this low-budget curiosity might have made for a juicy cult item if only the team had picked up the pace a bit. It's dreary instead of dangerous and tiresome instead of erotic. A subplot about the producer's young nephew trying to lose weight (and having sex with a prostitute dressed in a wig and pink see-through wrap) is just bizarre. As the assistant, Mary Woronov (Gershuny's then-wife) has amusingly diabolical eyebrows and silky chestnut hair falling passed her shoulders. She has the film's best directed and edited sequence, a quick series of auditions for a new skin-flick. Woronov is required to strip like the other actors but, unlike Lynn Lowry (continuously naked in a dual role), she isn't degraded by the camera; she's so assured an actress that towering over the C-grade material (literally) comes naturally for her. *1/2 from ****

Details

Official Sites:

Official site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

8 November 1973 (France)

Also Known As:

Love, Death

Filming Locations:

New York City, New York, USA

Box Office

Gross USA:

$78,340

Company Credits

Production Co:

15th Street Films, Armor Films Inc.

Technical Specs

Runtime:

82 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1